The disappearance of Amelia Earhart is one of the most enduring mysteries of the last century, but a team of explorers may finally have an answer. A group called Deep Sea Vision published new sonar images on Saturday that they believe may be the remains of Earhart’s plane. Their findings are promising, though some skeptics are already wondering if they spoke to soon.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937 while flying over the Pacific Ocean and were never seen or heard from again. After an extensive search, Earhart and Noonan were declared dead, while the public was left to speculate and wonder for 87 years. Deep Sea Vision claims that the speculation can stop as they believe they’ve found the plane about 16,000 feet below the ocean’s surface in the Pacific Ocean. Alongside the images on Instagram, they wrote that it “appears to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra” aircraft.
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Deep See Vision used state of the art equipment including sonar imaging and a submersible drone called “Hugin.” They scanned over 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor, working for about three months before they spotted the profile of an airplane down there. They found it about 100 miles from Howland Island – the destination Earhart and Noonan were heading toward for fuel and supplies before they vanished.
While Deep See Vision is confident, this is not a conclusive end to Earhart’s story yet. Even they plan to return to the site for a closer look, and independent sonar experts told The Wall Street Journal that they will need a more detailed image to confirm that this is Earhart’s plane. They said the best way to do so would be to pick out unique details of the craft compared to others that could have gone missing.
“Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” said underwater archaeologist Andrew Pietruszka. Meanwhile, this finding will also get pushback from proponents of other theories. Of course, there are those who believe in supernatural explanations including UFO abduction, hollow earth and so on. However, there are other scientifically-backed theories as well, including researcher Ric Gillespie’s 2018 report on his forensic study of Gardner Island.
Deep Sea Vision plans on studying its promising findings more closely, so an answer to Earhart’s disappearance may be coming soon once and for all. In the meantime, this may the last chance to explore conspiracy theories about Earhart’s disappearance before they are disproven.
